1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to a power converter and a method of operating the same, and more particularly to a soft-switching bi-directional power converter and a method of operating the same.
2. Description of Related Art
Reference is made to FIG. 1 which is a circuit diagram of a related art non-isolated DC-to-DC converter. The non-isolated DC-to-DC converter includes an input capacitor Ci, a main inductor L, a main switch Sm, a main diode Db, and an output capacitor Co, and supplies power to an external load RL. The conventional non-isolated DC-to-DC converter is a hard switching topology. Hence, the higher switching frequency results in the increased switching losses and enlarged size of the heat-dissipating device. In addition, the electromagnetic interference issue would be more serious due to the higher switching frequency. Also, the size of the EMI filter for solving the EMI issue would be enlarged.
Furthermore, the conventional non-isolated DC-to-DC converter usually provides uni-directional power transmission, that is, the power generated from the non-isolated DC-to-DC converter is transmitted from the input capacitor Ci to the output capacitor Co to supply power to the external load RL. It is much complicated to implement the bi-directional power transmission as well as soft-switching functions for the non-isolated DC-to-DC converter.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a soft-switching bi-directional power converter to generate complementary control signals to correspondingly control two transistor switches of the bi-directional switch to implement soft-switching bi-directional operation.